Chuck's Words

What a great day we, the Ubuntu Maryland LoCo Team, had in celebrating Software Freedom Day.

It started out, for me, kinda bad. I got to the library and as soon as I took things out of my trunk I realized that I had left my laptop at home. That was bad due to the fact that my presentations were on the hard drive. The library’s internet is locked down so there was no way to remote in to the home system. So I told the guys that were there what happened, left them to set up, and gave Peg a call who meet me half way. Once I got back the rest of the team had arrived and all had heard of the situation and promptly laughed with (read at) me.

After the laughing stopped we finished getting ready. The lab we were given to use had PCs which were running Groovix Linux, the library’s default for the public facing machines. We had rebooted the machines with the live Ubuntu 8.04 CDs so our guests could use, touch, and feel the distro in a more feature rich environment. Craig took point on setting up a table at the entrance handing out Ubuntu CDs and talking with patrons. As the day went on John went out to help as it was a busy area. I think the total disks handed out was somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 (or more) disks.

Meanwhile back in the presentation room, we got started a few minutes late with Alan Hastings’ great talk on ‘Why Open Source Matters’. This was followed with my rendition of the ‘Why Ubuntu’ presentation, John Biggs delivered an ‘OpenOffice’ talk and demo that kept everyone’s attention, Ron Swift described ‘Open Source in Small Business’ where he elaborated on the use of FOSS in his company. At this point we took a short break for lunch and free form discussion.

Amy Begg De Groff from the library got us started again after the break with an excellent description of how the library started using FOSS, what they are doing today and glimpses into some of the future plans. Jessica Tanenhaus graciously cut her Firefox/Thunderbird talk down to help us catch up on time but followed that with a GIMP presentation that impressed everyone. This led into our lightning talk session opened by John Tindale’s Scribus demo, my Pidgin talk, Chuck Fullerton’s Qemu demo showing how to run Ubuntu under Windows. I gave an impromptu talk on the Fedora LiveUSB creator followed by Alan’s Linux pipe organ show to close out the day. (All the slides of the presentations that I get will be posted in the near future)

All day long people came in and out with some staying with us the entire day. One person went home to bring back his laptop to try Ubuntu on it with our guidance. I think every talk given resulted in a great Q&A session on the topic at hand. Our guests who were being exposed to the FOSS topics, many for the first time, left with solid information and places to start their exploration. Everyone had a great day and our team left with some initial thoughts and ideas on future activities.

At the end of the day as people were leaving I was thanked by everyone who I spoke with for providing a great day of talks. I really have to thank my team and all of our speakers for volunteering their time and experience. Most of all thank you to the audience who attended with the great attitudes and questions for the presenters. We couldn’t have done any of this without all involved.